Today’s session on infant memory closed with some sobering news for mothers with diabetes – get your sugar under control, or your child may experience long-term memory difficulties for years to come.

When diabetic mothers experience abnormal blood sugar levels, the developing fetus feels it, too. As a result of the metabolic flux caused by rapidly changing sugar levels, the fetus may be chronically starved for oxygen and may also redirect iron away from the developing brain and other organs to the blood. This, said Tracey DeBoer of the University of California, Davis, can be particularly harmful to the hippocampus – a region of the brain that’s critical for memory

DeBoer and her colleagues tested long-term memory in infants born of diabetic mothers. One-year olds were taught to put a toy car in a container and push a car down a track. The investigators tested recall immediately after teaching infants the tasks and ten minutes later. Children who were born with iron levels in their blood – a sign that they’d experienced abnormal sugar levels in the uterus — performed just as well as the control group when asked to immediately recall the task. But after the ten-minute delay, they struggled more to remember what they’d been taught.

DeBoer followed up with the same kids two years later, and retested them with age-appropriate tasks that were more complicated and had to be remembered for a longer time. Again, children born with low iron were less successful at retaining memories of the learned task . The greater the iron deficiency at birth, the worse their performance.

On the bright side, DeBoer said that children born to mothers who kept their blood sugar under tight control had normal levels of iron at birth and passed their tests with flying colors.